May 27, 2024 for SCMP's Open Questions Series
Shen Zhihua is China's leading expert on Cold War history. The son of a top Communist Party security official and a former navy pilot, Shen is now a tenured history professor at Shanghai's East China Normal University and heads China's only Cold War history research centre.
As a historian, you have focused for many years on China's diplomacy during the Cold War, and have an exhaustive understanding of past and present China-Russia relations, as well as former China-Soviet relations. What does your research of these relations tell us about China and the wider world today?
My basic view is that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin wants to go backwards and rebuild the Russian empire. You can see this in what he is doing in the Caucasus, Chechnya, Belarus and Ukraine – he wants to bring back into the sphere of influence places that had been separated. This is actually a security threat to China, but it is opposed by the US and the West.
Now the relationship between China and the US is not good, so once again China and Russia have a common enemy that pushes them to unite.
In my opinion, China should stick to its foreign policy of the early days of reform and opening up, not aligning with others or drawing lines based on ideology.
In your book, A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976, you describe a complex triangular relationship between China, the Soviet Union and North Korea. What are your thoughts on how this evolved?
After the founding of the People's Republic, China and North Korea were both in the socialist camp, and when relations between China and the Soviet Union were good in the 1950s, North Korea was like a little brother with two big brothers helping it.
However, Kim Il-sung was the leader of North Korea but his authority was given by [Joseph] Stalin, so generally North Korea still followed the Soviet Union.
After China-Soviet relations soured, Mao took a very important step, which was to withdraw all the People's Volunteer Army forces stationed in North Korea. This meant that China would give North Korea full freedom. Otherwise, wouldn't Beijing be controlling North Korea with 400,000 troops in such a small place?
So, after 1958, the Kim family established its supremacy in North Korea thanks to Mao. The split between China and the Soviet Union actually gave North Korea more room to survive, because the two countries were facing each other in Northeast Asia, so each wanted to draw North Korea closer. This left the triangular security structure of China-North Korea-Soviet Union unchanged.
But later, after US-China relations thawed, the landscape of Northeast Asia changed. China's diplomatic goal was to unite the US against the Soviet Union, and North Korea's diplomatic goal was to unite the Soviet Union against the US, and the three came into conflict.
China wanted to join with the US in the triangular structure with South Korea against the Soviet Union, while at the same time defending the interests of North Korea. But the US had to defend South Korea's interests.
After the end of the Cold War, this structure became even more confused. Both China and the Soviet Union recognised South Korea. The US at that point said it wanted cross-recognition, but in fact neither the US nor Japan later recognised North Korea. So the six-party talks were needed to deal with the North Korean nuclear crisis, but that has not been resolved as of today.
Now that the relationship between China and the US is strained again, this issue is becoming more complicated.
So what's happening now with the triangle of China, North Korea and Russia?
I haven't done a specific study on what's happening now. But I have observed that Russia is now very close to North Korea. Since the deterioration of relations between China and the US, the military alliance between the US, South Korea and Japan has also grown closer.
There is a tendency to return to the pattern of confrontation between the north triangle and the south triangle. But I think it would be dangerous to go that far and possibly trigger a full-scale conflict. China should be cautious in this regard.
In your book, you mentioned that many Chinese policymakers and scholars were actually unaware of the real development of China-North Korea relations. Why is this?
The first obstacle is that the archives are not open to society and scholars.
The second is ideological restrictions, especially on textbooks and the findings of academics. There are certain views that have been formed that just cannot be changed. That does not work. As science develops and historical archives continue to be opened, people's interpretations of history will certainly change.
China is the worst in terms of the openness of its archives, because they are basically not open to the public. It is very difficult to go into any archive these days and see any material.
The declassification of diplomatic archives can represent the modernisation of a country. The foreign ministry archives were declassified in 2004, which was a sensation. But then it was slowly closed down, perhaps because they felt it was rather sensitive.
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